How do you build automated bowser tests that remain reliable and maintainable across Windchill upgrades?

Title: Windchill Upgrades: How Do You Handle Automated Browser Testing and Regression Testing?

Hello Windchill Community,

One of the recurring challenges in managing a Windchill environment is ensuring that existing business processes continue to work as expected after an upgrade or a major configuration change.

While upgrading Windchill can bring important improvements, validating the impact on existing functionality remains a significant effort. Key user journeys — such as navigating the product structure, managing documents, updating attributes, working with change objects, or executing approval workflows — need to be tested again and again.

Manual regression testing can quickly become time-consuming, especially when the number of customizations, integrations, and business-specific processes grows.

Automated browser testing seems like an obvious solution, but in practice, many teams encounter a different challenge: how do you build automated tests that remain reliable and maintainable across Windchill upgrades?

Brittle scripts, changing UI elements, authentication mechanisms, and differences between environments can make test maintenance almost as demanding as manual testing itself.

I'm interested in hearing how other Windchill teams approach this challenge:

• Have you successfully implemented browser-based regression testing for Windchill?

• How do you handle test maintenance when upgrading to a new Windchill release?

• Which critical business processes do you prioritize for automated testing?

• What has prevented you from scaling test automation in your environment?

We have been exploring approaches to browser test automation specifically for Windchill, with a focus on making regression testing more repeatable and reducing the effort required to validate upgrades.

The goal is to move towards a more systematic way of verifying that critical business processes continue to work after a change, rather than relying exclusively on manual checks.

I'd be particularly interested in exchanging experiences with teams that have struggled to make browser automation robust enough for long-term use.

What has worked for you, and what challenges are you still facing?

Looking forward to hearing your experiences and ideas.